No subject

theoretical work, no one doing any lab work, and no places for
aspiring PhD students to join up with the effort at all.

I've asked certain well known people in the field (indeed, some of the
best known people in the field) for advice or even encouragement, and
generally speaking they don't bother replying to one's email, or if
they do they send a line or two saying "sorry, no advice to give, good
luck."  It feels almost as though they don't want anyone to help make
the dream happen.

So long as we're in an environment where essentially no one is working
on the problem in academia, no one is working on it in industry, and
the few that understand the problem and are in a position to mentor
people are uninterested in doing so, no one new is going to start
working on the field, no progress will be made, and we'll be more or
less where we are now for many years to come.

The vision described in Engines of Creation is an ambitious
one. Achieving it will require the labor of thousands of people in
research labs over the course of decades to achieve. This is not an
insurmountable obstacle -- it took decades and thousands of people to
get where we are today biotechnology, on the verge of the creation of
fully synthetic organisms.

However, anyone who has the ability and desire to can go off and get a
PhD in molecular biology and devote their labor to the biotechnology
effort, while no one who has ability and desire has any way at all to
join up with the non-existent mechanosynthesis research effort. Small
wonder, then, that no one is doing the research.

Thus, the vision will remain just as far away from reality for many
years to come as it is today.


Perry